Artificial intelligence and communication: A Human–Machine Communication research agenda

By Andrea L. Guzman, Seth C. Lewis. New Media & Society, 2019

743 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and people’s interactions with it—through virtual agents, socialbots, and language-generation software—do not fit neatly into paradigms of communication theory that have long focused on human–human communication. To address this disconnect between communication theory and emerging technology, this article provides a starting point for articulating the differences between communicative AI and previous technologies and introduces a theoretical basis for navigating these conditions in the form of scholarship within human–machine communication (HMC). Drawing on an HMC framework, we outline a research agenda built around three key aspects of communicative AI technologies: (1) the functional dimensions through which people make sense of these devices and applications as communicators, (2) the relational dynamics through which people associate with these technologies and, in turn, relate to themselves and others, and (3) the metaphysical implications called up by blurring ontological boundaries surrounding what constitutes human, machine, and communication.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e307e074f5a54185834aaf83c5fb4a9bac6f7e6

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Citations in the corpus

Learning design to support student-AI collaboration: perspectives of leading teachers for AI in education (2022, methodology): “Instead of fixing a conceptualization of interaction as a human-only process and the role of technology as a mediating tool, the model opens the theoretical possibility of AI as an interaction subject directly exchanging information with students in a learning process (Guzman & Lewis, 2020).”
Cultural bias and cultural alignment of large language models (2023, background): “How language is produced and transmitted has changed drastically as a result of digital communication technologies and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) [20], especially emerging generative AI applications such as ChatGPT [2].”
Too human and not human enough: A grounded theory analysis of mental health harms from emotional dependence on the social chatbot Replika (2022, background): “As noted by Guzman and Lewis (2020), there is need for additional research exploring the functional and relational dimensions of AI technologies as communicators that people speak with , rather than as mediators that facilitate human-to-human communication.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) and big data in cancer and precision oncology (2020, methodology): “The accuracy of the data is warranted by implementing deep learning of machines [4–10]. improve disease management and provide effective medical care.”
Artificial Intelligence and Journalism (2019, background): “…communicative tasks, such as home assistants and social robots, scholars across communication’s subfields are negotiating these and other divides, efforts that are encompassed within the emerging area of communication research known as HMC (Guzman, 2018; Guzman & Lewis, 2019; Spence, 2019).”